Medieval Europe: Every Kingdom's Rise And Fall

1492. Europe was already divided among powerful states. Some peoples had their own kingdoms, others lived within large empires or within city-states. The political map of the continent was already recognizable, but it had been forming for centuries. The old order disappeared when the center of power fell, the Western Roman Empire. Europe was swept by wars and migrations, borders constantly changed. New peoples and states emerged from this chaos. At the center of these processes stood the Carolingian Empire. While Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious were alive, it remained united. When they died, the state quickly fell apart. The Treaty of Verdun divided it into three parts. Thus, the future France and the Holy Roman Empire arose. Otto the Great was the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Formally, he headed a single state. In reality, he controlled only part of its territories. German princes fought among themselves. Popes defended the power of the church. Emperors tried to subdue Italy and failed. The Investiture Controversy, the Walk to Canossa, and the wars with the cities of Northern Italy showed the main thing. The empire was not becoming centralized. Princes strengthened their authority. Cities preserved autonomy. The papacy remained independent. The Golden Bull solidified this order. The empire finally turned into a union of principalities. Unity rested not on institutions but on the dynasty. The Habsburgs ruled the Holy Roman Empire from the late Middle Ages until the era of the Napoleonic Wars. The entire empire rested on German lands. To become emperor, one had to hold the title of King of Germany. Despite this, the Holy Roman Empire was multinational. Not only Germans but also Swiss, Austrians, Dutch, and Belgians were formed here. To the east of the German lands, in Bohemia, the Czechs were forming. West Slavic tribes settled in the Vltava Basin as early as the 6th century. Later, the Promislid dynasty created the Duchy of Bohemia, and Prince Wenceslas I became a symbol of Christianization and a national saint. In the 12th century, Bohemia received royal status within the Holy Roman Empire. The king's power strengthened. The greatest flourishing came under Charles IV of Luxembourg. Prague became one of Europe's cultural centers, and the elites spoke Czech. The king possessed both the Bohemian and Imperial crowns. The Czechs clearly recognized themselves as a separate people. But the relative calm did not last long. The Hussite Wars broke out. Religious conflict and resistance to imperial influence finally cemented Czech identity. Meanwhile, in the west, France was taking shape. The first French king was Hugh Capet, according to a common version, the nephew of Otto the Great. He controlled a tiny territory, while dukes and counts, formerly his vassals, had their own wealth and influence. Yet, generation after generation, the Capetians expanded their power and broke feudal fragmentation. The Crusades helped the king keep the country together. The French nobility were among the most active participants in the religious wars of Christians against Muslims. The First Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban II in the French city of Clermont. France's participation in the campaign strengthened the king's authority. The greatest challenge for France was the Hundred Years' War with England, one of the longest and most brutal conflicts in European history. The English nearly won, but everything changed because of Joan of Arc. She lifted the siege of Orleans and opened the path to the coronation of Charles VII. The war turned into a struggle for France's survival. The English executed Joan. Nevertheless, the conflict continued. Twenty years later, the French drove the English out of their lands. The kingdom emerged from the war exhausted but united. It was then that the French first appeared as a single political community. For the English themselves, everything began with the Germanic tribes of the Anglo-Saxons who settled the British Isles during the migration period. Then the heptarchy arose. Seven kingdoms, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia, and Kent. They too fought invaders. The Vikings destroyed four kingdoms, but Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, saved the rest. He united the Anglo-Saxon lands. Thus, English unity arose. The Viking invasions did not destroy England. Rather, they became its beginning. Æthelstan, Alfred's grandson, united the English lands into a single state and ascended the throne as the first king of England. The English became a people when they drove out the Vikings. But the struggle with the Scandinavians did not end. The Norman Duke William the Conqueror invaded England. He led a Franco-Norman army and defeated the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. The Norman conquest changed England. The old elite was almost completely destroyed by the new authority. The state was rebooted. Culture changed. England became a strong, centralized, and European state. The English language arose from the combination of two languages, French, spoken by the elites, and Old English of the common people. After the Norman conquest, England was united not by clans, but by a pact. Between the old land and the new power. Between languages, customs, and law. Centralization was continued by the Plantagenet dynasty. The War of the Red and White Roses, which was fought between junior branches of the dynasty, brought the Tudors to power. Other peoples of Celtic origin also lived on the British Isles. The Scots occupied the north of Britain, the largest European island. The Irish, the island of Ireland. The Scottish Kingdom was founded by Kenneth I. He ruled the Picts, one of the Celtic tribes. The Scots fought the English for land, power, and the right to their own state. The symbol of this struggle became William Wallace, leader of the First War of Scottish Independence. By the 13th century, Scotland had defended its independence. It became a single kingdom with its own dynasty, law, and church. The Scots formed a nation, thanks to a shared state. The Irish acted differently. They had no single state. Dozens of kingdoms arose and disappeared on the island. Nonetheless, culture, language, customs, and Christianity held the Irish together no worse than a strong monarch. Traditionally, an external enemy also played a role. After the Norman invasion, Ireland fell under the influence of the English crown for several centuries. The Irish became a nation without a single state, but with a single culture, and an understanding that they were not English. The Vikings carried out raids across Europe from the 8th to the 11th century. But their homeland, cold Scandinavia, also became an arena for the formation of nations. Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes. At first, separate kingdoms appeared. Norway arose as a single state under Harald Fairhair after the Battle of Huffersfjord. The people formed around royal power. Geography and climate also had their influence. Isolation fostered the development of local traditions, and the sea, expansion to Iceland and Greenland. The first ruler of a united Denmark about whom reliable evidence survives was Gorm the Old. His son, Harald Bluetooth, Christianized the country and strengthened royal authority. A strong monarchy created Danish identity. Sweden, by contrast, long remained fragmented. Tribes merged slowly until around 970. Erik VI the Victorious became the first historically confirmed king of Sweden. He strengthened the kingdom. Christianity spread across the country. The Swedes united. They became a distinct community later than their neighbors. At the core of their identity lay three things. Royal power, the church, and expansion eastward to Finland. The Scandinavian peoples arose not from tribes, but from kingdoms. First, there was the state, then the people. Later, the Danish queen Margaret I formed the Kalmar Union from three kingdoms. Erik of Pomerania became the first common king. The countries retained sovereignty, but for more than a hundred years, their policy was directed by one monarch. The Kalmar Union also included other nations, Icelanders, Faroese, and Greenlanders. From the largest European peninsula, the Scandinavian, to the Iberian, the second largest, these lands once belonged to the Roman Empire. When Rome fell, the Germanic Visigoth tribes seized the peninsula. For the Spanish people, this became the foundation. The shared Christian tradition of the Visigoths and the descendants of the Romans united the population. Then, a common religious enemy appeared, the Muslims. At the Battle of Guadalete, an Umayyad commander defeated the Visigoths. Within ten years, the Moors conquered the entire Iberian peninsula. The first to rise against them was the Visigoth Pelagius. He founded the kingdom of Asturias and began the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. The kingdoms of the Pyrenees fought the Moors for almost 800 years. The Reconquista created a shared identity, Christians against Muslims, kings against rulers. The symbol of the struggle became El Cid, a knight and national hero of Spain. In the second half of the 15th century, the Christians had almost driven out the Moors. The marriage of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon effectively made Spain a single whole under the joint rule of the Catholic monarchs. In 1492, Granada fell, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain. The Emirate of Granada disappeared. That same year, Christopher Columbus, a Genoese in Spanish service, discovered America, changing the history of Spain and the world. The Spanish formed through the Reconquista, a sacred war, a shared faith, and the marriage of rulers. When Castile and Aragon became one whole, a united Spain appeared on the map, and the Castilian language became common for the entire country. But on the Iberian peninsula, there was another people, the Portuguese. They lived on the edge of Europe. For a long time, their history coincided with Spain's, Visigoths, Roman heritage, Christianity, and a common enemy, the Moors. Ties with northern Spain were close. In the 9th century, Vímara Pérez, a vassal and distant relative of the King of Asturias, reconquered from the Moors the city of Portus Calle. He received the title of count and began to rule the new lands. For almost 200 years, the county of Portugal was part of various Spanish kingdoms. It was then that Portuguese identity began to form. In 1139, Count Afonso I proclaimed himself King of Portugal, and four years later, he secured recognition of its independence. The Portuguese completed the Reconquista earlier than the Spanish. After that, the borders of the kingdom remained almost unchanged. Portuguese identity was also shaped by maritime expansion. Its key moment was the voyage of Vasco de Gama and the discovery of the sea route to India. The Romans left their mark across all Europe, but the heart of Rome was the Apennine Peninsula. It was there that the Italians appeared, a people without a single state. After the fall of Rome, what they shared remained Roman heritage, the Latin language, Christianity, and urban culture. Yet politically, the Italians had no unity for centuries. Rulers changed on the Apennines, Ostrogoths and Byzantines, Lombards and Franks, Moors and Normans. Alongside them existed Italian states, city republics, and the theocratic papal state, the spiritual center of Catholic Europe. Medieval Italy was a mosaic, too rich for political unity and at the same time too attractive to its neighbors. Italians were shaped not by a state but by heritage. The Roman past, language, urban culture, and the church became capital past from generation to generation and gradually transformed into a national consciousness. The image of Italians as a distinct nation had already taken shape in the late Middle Ages. What united them into a renaissance gave a sense of shared identity. The works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio established the Florentine dialect as the basis of the Italian language. The Catholic Church, memory of Rome's greatness, and the economic interests of the city republics united Italy no worse than power or a common enemy. Italians became a nation long before the appearance of their own state. The Byzantine Empire, heir to ancient Rome and the center of the Christian East, at the beginning of the Middle Ages controlled vast territories. Over time it weakened and new states and peoples arose in the Balkans. Slavic tribes together with Turkic Bulgars from Central Asia settled the Balkan peninsula. The Bulgars created their own state, the First Bulgarian Empire, and quickly merged with the Slavs. Two hundred years later, Prince Boris I accepted Christianity from Byzantium. Already in the high Middle Ages, the Bulgarian people had formed on the basis of the Slavic language, Byzantine culture, and local traditions. The Byzantines destroyed the First Bulgarian Empire, but a century and a half later the Bulgarians rebelled and restored statehood. Thus arose the Second Bulgarian Empire. At the same time, another Balkan people was forming, the Serbs. Their ancestors settled in the Balkans under Byzantine influence. Prince Vysheslav, about a century later than the Bulgarians, founded the first Serbian state, the Serbian Principality. In the 9th century, Bulgarian missionaries brought Byzantine Christianity to Serbia. By the 13th century, the Serbs had become a distinct Orthodox people with their own ruling dynasty and culture. Against the backdrop of Byzantium's gradual decline, the Serbian ruler Stefan Dusan proclaimed the Serbian Empire, the most powerful state of Southeast Europe of its time. But in the late Middle Ages, the Balkan peoples again found themselves in the shadow of a mighty empire. This time, it was not Byzantium, which, together with conquest, brought Christianity and cultural development, but the Ottoman Empire, with another faith, another political logic, and an alien cultural model. First, the Ottomans defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Maritsa. The Serbian Empire broke into small domains. Then came the Battle of Kosovo, after which most Serbian rulers became Ottoman vassals. A similar fate befell Bulgaria. The Ottomans captured Tarnovo, the capital of the Bulgarian state, and later crushed the European crusaders near the fortress of Nicopolis. This was the last attempt of Christian Europe to save Bulgaria. From then on, for almost five centuries, Serbs and Bulgarians lived under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The states were gone, but the Serbs and Bulgarians endured as peoples. They were sustained by language, the church, and the memory of their past. Meanwhile, on the eastern frontier of medieval Europe, other nations were taking shape. Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians were neighbors, and began under similar conditions. But their historical paths turned out to be fundamentally different. The West Slavic tribes who lived in the Vistula Basin became the foundation of the Polish people. One of them, the Western Polans, gave its name to the entire community. Prince Mieszko I united the Polish tribes, and created the Niezo State, the predecessor of the Kingdom of Poland. Just six years later, he married a Czech princess and accepted Catholic baptism, beginning the Christianization of the Polish lands. This baptism was not only a religious act, but a civilizational choice. The Polish people chose the West, Latin culture, the Catholic Church, and a new way of being part of Europe. Sixty years later, his son, Bolesław the Brave, was crowned as Polish ruler. From that time, the history of the Kingdom of Poland began. Along with it arose the Polish people as a community of language, faith, culture, and a noble political tradition. The later history of the Poles became closely intertwined with the Lithuanians. Today, Lithuania is a small Baltic state, but in the Middle Ages it controlled land stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The Lithuanian tribes were united by Prince Mindaugas, much later compared to other Europeans. Therefore, the Lithuanian people and language grew out of tribal unity rather than an early state. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded rapidly and remained pagan longer than almost all of Europe. In the 14th century, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were brought closer by common enemies. First came the German Crusaders, and later the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The Union of Cravo sealed the alliance. Prince Jogaila married the Polish queen, baptized Lithuania, and concluded a dynastic union with Poland. But the Union of Cravo was not merely a marriage and dynastic act. It was a decision by different peoples about a shared future within one political space, without losing themselves. Lithuanians preserved their language and culture, even while in political unions with Poland. Their identity rested on tribal tradition, princely authority, and the legacy of a pagan past, and later also on Catholicism. The ethnic foundation of Ukrainians was the East Slavic tribes. The semi-legendary Prince Oleg came from the north, subdued the local lands, and created a new state, Kievan Rus'. Its center became Kiev, the political, economic, and cultural foundation of the region. The ruling elite had northern origins and brought with it Scandinavian traditions. Yet, over time, Byzantine influence became decisive. Prince Vladimir married a Byzantine princess and baptized Kievan Rus'. Christianity and princely power united the country. Norman, Byzantine, and East Slavic traditions merged within one state, forming a common cultural space. Later, Kievan Rus' broke apart into separate principalities, Kiev, Galicia-Volhynia, and others. Some of them became the basis for the formation of other nations, in particular Russians and the Belarusians. The Mongol invasion finally destroyed the old system. Ukrainian identity was formed already within another state, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which wrested the southwestern lands of Kievan Rus' from the Mongols. The local language, law, orthodox faith, and the role of the Ruthenian nobility allowed these lands to preserve their own cultural continuity. On Europe's eastern edge, another people was also taking shape, the Hungarians. They differed from the others. Nomadic Hungarian tribes from the steppes between the Urals and the Black Sea, led by the chieftain Arpad at the end of the 9th century, seized the Pannonian Basin. Hungarian history calls this event the Conquest of the Homeland, the moment Hungary was born. Arpad founded the Hungarian Principality. At first, the Hungarians remained nomads, but their defeat by the Germans on the Lek River forced a choice. They abandoned raids and became a settled European people. Half a century later, Prince Stephen I accepted Christianity from Rome and turned the principality into a kingdom. Thus, Hungary entered the Catholic Christian world while preserving its Finno-Ugric language, unique in Europe. A nomadic Asian people became a European state without losing itself. After the fall of Rome, Europe consisted of descendants of Romans and dozens of tribes, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric. These were not yet nations in the modern sense, rather the beginnings of future nations. In most cases, it was the state that unified people into a community. Religion became a civilizational choice. Christianity of the Roman type or the Byzantine type ultimately solidified identity. And language made each people a distinct community, finally defining the boundaries of what was one's own. By 1492, Europe had created something no other civilization possessed. Dozens of peoples with their own languages, states, and identities, yet connected by a shared culture and faith. And this mixture of unity and rivalry gave Europe the impulse that would carry it beyond the continent over the next three centuries.